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<title>how diane nguyen spun out. by o_uchies</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29579229">how diane nguyen spun out.</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/o_uchies/pseuds/o_uchies'>o_uchies</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>BoJack Horseman</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, F/M, Short and Sweet (I guess)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 23:46:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,126</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29579229</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/o_uchies/pseuds/o_uchies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"I was terrified of coming back here for the wedding. Seeing Mr. Peanutbutter. Seeing you."</em>
</p><p>  <em>"What'd you think was going to happen?"</em></p><p>  <em>"I don't know. I would spin out, start questioning everything, blow everything up."</em></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>BoJack Horseman/Diane Nguyen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>how diane nguyen spun out.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When BoJack joins Diane on the roof of the wedding venue, it feels like a joke without a punchline.</p><p>Diane sits with her knees pulled tight against her chest and a menthol cigarette clenched between her teeth. Her eyes follow BoJack across the spanish-orange tile — an orange that’s followed her for twelve years but has now been stained with the ash from her newports.</p><p>“Hey,” Diane says, inhaling the smoke and letting it sit in her mouth for a little longer than necessary. She tries not to stare.</p><p>BoJack’s hair is cut close to the scalp. A pewter gray has seized the sides of his head and has begun creeping towards the top. The color winds through his beard like strings of fine, white smoke. If she wasn’t as cynical as she was, she would take his physical transformation as a metaphor, a symbol for change. In truth, he looks more charitable. Paternal, even. He looks like the kind of Hollywoo star you would stumble across on a “Where Are They Now?” article at two o'clock in the morning nestled between Lisa Turtle from <em>Saved by the Bell</em> and some <em>Are You Afraid of the Dark?</em> extra.</p><p>She knows that his transformation means nothing, however. Her mental connection between BoJack and his so-called 'fatherhood' is a fabrication, attributed to years of recording episodes of <em>Horsin’ Around</em> over blank VHS tapes and binging them in times of great distress. This adolescent ritual had caused this previous incarnation of BoJack Horseman to get stuck in her mind. His 20th-century fictional-self was permanently lodged in her temporal lobe.</p><p>He sits too close to her, and she’s irritated when she accidentally inhales the musky combination of overpriced aftershave and patchouli cologne, a scent that clings in the collar of his blazer. It’s the same scent he wore the last time they saw each other and, more regrettably, the time-before-last, when her fingers were curled around his left shoulder with a previously-unknown intensity. Her eyes had bored into his. She was searching for a moment of hesitation.</p><p>
  <em>‘I can’t leave if I don’t know you’re going to be okay.’</em>
</p><p>She had already moved out of her Le Triste apartment. Her landlord posted the listing and found a new tenant three weeks after Diane notified him of her move — a lovely, young couple with big dreams of Hollywoo infamy and little budget to match. Her lease had already ended. She received her security deposit. The US Postal Service was alerted regarding her new address. Jesus Christ. The U-Haul was still hitched to the back of her Toyota Prius. Everything was already set in stone. Still, she would’ve given it up if he'd only asked.</p><p>He didn’t.</p><p>His scent is something you could’ve bottled and sold to a pubescent Diane Nguyen: the high-school freshman who still had a <em>Horsin’ Around</em> poster tacked above her headboard, the forlorn teen whose first crush was an amateur sitcom-actor 15 years her senior with a thunderstorm looming behind his eyes. At one time he was beautiful, with long eyelashes, high cheekbones sunk to a concerning degree through his use of illegally-obtained amphetamines, and under-eye circles barely concealed by the makeup artist with a duo-stick far too light for his complexion.</p><p>During her sophomore year, before the summer break, Diane gut-punched Katie Williams after listening to her mock the picture she’d stuck to the inside of her locker — a publicity picture of BoJack Horseman she’d cut from a shoplifted <em>People</em> magazine. It was <em>People</em>’s 1996 edition of “Hollywood’s 100 Most Eligible Bachelors.” He scored 35th place that year, tailing behind Lenny Kravitz.</p><p>
  <em>‘He’s going off the deep end though. You know that, right?’</em>
</p><p>
  <em>‘Shut up. No, he’s not.’</em>
</p><p><em>‘Yeah. Well, he called Ellen a skank during some interview. It was in the</em> Hollywood Reporter <em>last month.’</em></p><p>Katie wasn’t lying either. He did say that during an interview with the <em>Hollywood Reporter</em>. He then went on to say other reprehensible things during interviews with other magazine brands, and he normally issued an apology about a month later with an entirely different magazine brand about how he was 'under the influence' during the interview, and how he 'wasn’t in control of his actions' at the time, before promoting whatever project he was diving head-first into that month. Even still, she found herself eager to defend him, just like when her current-husband stumbled across an exclusive CNN interview while channel-surfing and was met with the face of a young boy on the verge of tears detailing the horror of finding his family’s mid-century manor broken into and the body of a near-dead pseudo-celebrity floating in their pool.</p><p>
  <em>‘I mean— he’s a train-wreck, Diane! Why are you defending him?’</em>
</p><p>Yeah, Diane. Why are you defending him?</p><p>Now he’s sitting painfully close to her. Her eyes follow his long-fingered, elegant hands while they play with the awkward curvature of the spanish tiles. She listens to his gravelly voice, stained by years of abuse to his lungs. She watches the corners of his mouth widen into an anxious smile, a smile that always read, <em>‘Please read between the lines,’</em> to which Diane always promised to do just that. She wants to relinquish him of guilt again. She wants to make him feel better about the choices he’s made thus far and the position he’s currently found himself in.</p><p>She doesn’t.</p><p>She wants to tell him that she hasn’t evolved much either. She’s still the same Diane who avoided meeting her husband’s eyes for four years while taking up space in his Spanish Colonial villa. She’s the same Diane whose guidance counselor urged to take antidepressants during her sophomore year at Boston University because her parents just couldn’t be bothered with their overly-emotional daughter. She’s the same Diane whose first real heart-break was recorded over her minor-league softball tournament at the hands of her brothers. She’s the same Diane who was violently shoved into the bathroom stall by senior Ellie Nicholson and cried a bit too loud when the back of her head struck the porcelain toilet seat. Flinging herself into a different marriage, a different job, and a different city hasn’t changed anything. Sure, she’s on pills and they help, but they don’t change her the way she wants to be changed. She wants to tell him that she hasn’t found happiness nor does she have the heart to believe she ever will.</p><p>She can’t find the words.</p><p>She wants to tell BoJack that she was at her happiest when she was in Los Angeles — even during the arguments, even without the pills, even while in the clutches of her depressive spells. She wants to tell BoJack that she loves him.</p><p>Her mouth won’t let her, so she tells him “Thank you” instead.</p>
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